Child Obesity Risks Death at Early Age, Study Finds

A rare study that tracked thousands of children through adulthood found the heaviest youngsters were more than twice as likely as the thinnest to die prematurely, before age 55, of illness or a self-inflicted injury.

Youngsters with a condition called pre-diabetes were at almost double the risk of dying before 55, and those with high blood pressure were at some increased risk. But obesity was the factor most closely associated with an early death, researchers said.

Three Simple Steps to Healthy Weight in Children

To curb the childhood-obesity epidemic, health experts have long urged parents to make healthy changes to their family's lifestyle — such as eating nutritiously, reducing TV time, exercising and getting a good night's sleep.

Individually, these behaviors have been linked to a lower risk of obesity in kids, but researchers at Ohio State University were interested in learning whether their effect might be cumulative — that is, whether families who adopted not just one but two or more of these behaviors could reduce their children's risk of obesity even further.

Study links sugary soft drinks to pancreas cancer

People who drink two or more sweetened soft drinks a week have a much higher risk of pancreatic cancer, an unusual but deadly cancer, researchers reported on Monday.

People who drank mostly fruit juice instead of sodas did not have the same risk, the study of 60,000 people in Singapore found.

Sugar may be to blame but people who drink sweetened sodas regularly often have other poor health habits, said Mark Pereira of the University of Minnesota, who led the study.

"The high levels of sugar in soft drinks may be increasing the level of insulin in the body, which we think contributes to pancreatic cancer cell growth," Pereira said in a statement.

Promising Blood test For Pancreatic Cancer Detection

Scientists state that they have been successful in developing a blood test which could detect pancreatic cancer early on in its more treatable stages.

The test employs an antibody that functions as a heat-detecting projectile that homes in and attaches to cells which bear PAM4 protein which is found vastly in pancreatic cancer cases.

The researchers stated that this protein is pancreatic cancer-specific and is atypically present in healthy tissues or in other types of cancers.

India to turn out over 145,000 rural doctors

With people-doctor ratio six times lower in rural India in comparison to cities, the central government on Thursday said it will produce 145,000 rural doctors through a truncated medical course designed after the Chinese "barefoot doctors".
"The proposal envisages training persons from rural areas on the basis of merit to equip him or her to primarily, I underline, primarily to work in 145,000 sub centres," Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said here.

Iron deficiency V/S thal minor V/S chronic disease anemia

A variety of equations have been proposed to distinguish the microcytic anemia of iron deficiency from that of thalassemia minor.

These formulas may not be applicable:

(1) if the patient has been treated with iron;

(2) if the patient has been treated with blood transfusions;

(3) if both iron deficiency and thalassemia minor coexist in the same patient

(4) in some patients with polycythemia vera who develop iron deficiency (England-Fraser formula)

Some of the formulas do not account for a gray, intermediate region where it is not possible to differentiate between the two conditions reliably.

Mentzer Formula

How One Woman's Cells Changed Medicine

               In a microbiology lab at New York's Columbia University, Professor Vincent Racaniello experiments with some cells that have led to some of the greatest medical breakthroughs of the last hundred years. But these are no ordinary cells.

Henrietta Lacks, circa 1950.

(Courtesy of PNAS.org)

They're called, HeLa. And they were first used in research that led to the Polio vaccine, as well as helping to develop medicines to fight cancer, the flu and Parkinson's disease, and in the research that led to gene mapping and cloning. They were used to test the effects of atomic radiation and sent into outer space.